Mother of Navalny 'put under pressure to bury him in secret'

Alexei Navalny's mother said she had been shown the body of her son but that the authorities were "blackmailing" her into burying him in a secret ceremony without mourners.

- Pjotr Sauer

In a video message yesterday, Lyudmila Navalnaya said she was driven to a morgue on Wednesday evening, where authorities showed her the body. Navalnaya said she recorded the video because she was being threatened into agreeing to a secret funeral for her son and that the authorities refused to give his body unless she agreed to their terms.

"They want it to be done secretly, without a goodbye. They want to bring me to the edge of the cemetery, to a fresh grave, and say: 'Here lies your son. I don't agree to that," she said. "They say that if I don't agree to a secret burial, they will do something with my son's body."

Navalnaya said the investigators told her: "Time is not on your side, the corpse decomposes." 

Navalnaya said she wanted everyone for whom Navalny's death was "a personal tragedy" to have an opportunity to say goodbye to him.

Shortly after Navalnaya's message was published, Navalny's team announced that a death certificate that was shown to her said the opposition leader died from "natural causes". Allies of Navalny described the authority's conduct surrounding his body as "medieval". "This kind of abuse of a dead body is hard to even imagine," said Ivan Zhdanov, a close ally of the Navalny family.